I work in Technology for a Middle School and since start of school our Computer Application teacher has been using the MIT Appinventor without any issues with his students. Just this past week when students try logging in, after logon our firewall is blocking further access.
I've worked with our network admin and he suspects that MIT is using a YouTube integration for login using Google, and since we have YouTube blocked for students this is what's preventing students from proceeding.
Can anyone confirm or deny that MIT is or isn't using any sort of YouTube integration with Google login?
MIT has not integrated You Tube with their Google Login. The App Inventor Login uses Oauth2 authentication with Google Accounts which yields the convenient "Sign in with Google" interface. This has been in place for a very long time.
It's not a part of App Inventor. It is a part of the Google sign-in process in general. The sign-in form sends your password to https://accounts.google.com/_/signin/challenge, which redirects to https://accounts.google.com/CheckCookie which then reditects to https://accounts.youtube.com/accounts/SetSID.
....Would still like to see screenshots please, from the login form, to the point where you are unable to login.
The point being that until this week, The Teacher and Students were able to login to App Inventor. MIT has not changed anything and, since no other Users out of at least a hundred thousand this month have not reported a change or problem, it seems unlikely that Google has changed.
The process on my desktop, which is shared with other Google Account holders:
Open the network tab of the inspector before logging in, check preserve log, log in, then go back to the inspector and search for youtube. You will see that it has several invisible redirects when logging in to the account. This is not app inventor-specific behavior, and has been going on for many years. @Joey_Ketcham if you could tell us if your students can log in to any Google websites at all it would be great, as the issue I think you are having would block all Google logins. The easy way to get around this issue would be to unblock accounts.youtube.com, leaving the rest of youtube blocked.
Here is a screenshot of what the student's get. They get to the "Sign in with Google" and select their account, then it immediately takes them to this page. The details shows it hitting YouTube which is why our network admin thinks there is some sort of YouTube integration and since we have YouTube blocked, that's why they can't access Appinventor.
You might test whether students can access any other sites using a "Sign in with Google" as recommended by @easrng
Possibly your IT could try whitelistingaccounts.youtube.com See what happens. You could wait for an opinion from one of the MIT developers (who was invited to join this discussion) or just try whitelisting. His suggestion seems reasonable and might work. Hopefully you will have a solution for classes this week. Let us know what happens Joey. If it does not work; follow the advice provided in the link.
Another issue is IT might be blocking http addresses; allowing only https as a huge guess.
Many platforms we use within our district utilizes the Google login without any issues. Whitelisting YouTube isn't an option, we have it blocked due to a large number of students who abused the access to it during school hours so it was agreed upon across the board to block the access. We also do not block http addresses.
The recommendation was to try whitelist accounts.youtube.... but to BLOCK the rest of youtube as you do now at the same time. Block youtube and whitelist accounts. if that is possible.
Ah, gotcha. I'll check with my network admin tomorrow and see if he can add that to the whitelist and see what happens. I'll post the results of that tomorrow, hopefully that works.
I think that is the key, nothing has changed recently with MIT or Google, so that suggests the School IT have changed something recently and hence the issue.
I had our network admin whitelist accounts.youtube.com and that did the trick. I'm guessing Google added a redirect to their Google sign in that goes through accounts.youtube.com because I did see today that many sites that students logged into via Google had the exact same issue, but all is good now.
We don't do any integration with YouTube. App Inventor uses the standard OAuth workflow that Google provides. If it's somehow going through accounts.youtube.com I think that is an issue with how Google is handling the auth flow. Another option if it continues to be a problem, you can use an alternative login mechanism by going directly to http://ai2.appinventor.mit.edu/login/google.
